Personality

Uncle Solomon knew the "ways of the road," including many people and information about the world. In Meet Addy, he knew Miss Caroline and in Shadows on Society Hill he was acquainted with Mrs. Radisson.

While he, Lula, and the Walkers are not related by blood, they consider each other family as plantation families were often separated and had to make new connections. As he and Lula are older, they relate to the Walkers much like children and grandchildren.

He told Addy that freedom's got its cost, a statement that stays with her and her family.

A letter from Bertha Gilbert lets the Walkers know that Solomon, Lula, and Esther are on the way to Philadelphia; she saw them at a freedman's camp she was working at in Raleigh, North Carolina near Virginia. Uncle Solomon appeared frail and thin, and they had left about a week before Addy's inquiry had arrived.

Auntie Lula tells the Walkers upon her arrival that Uncle Solomon died in one of the freedman camps outside Philadelphia and was buried there. He had been sick near the end of the war, but hadn't wanted to die on the plantation where he had been a slave and wanted to get Esther back to her family. Addy is greatly saddened by this, and Auntie Lula tells her that it was all right as he died a free man and got as close to Philadelphia as he could before dying, so he did what he set out to do.

Lula also lets Addy know that when the Emancipation Proclamation came through, Solomon had strutted into the cabin proudly before kneeling and thanking the Lord.